Dane Sweeny, the wildcard who took down the 13th seed at the US Open

The best story at this US Open belongs to a man who was not supposed to be in the tournament at all.

His name is Dane Sweeny. He is 25, he is from the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, and on Thursday night he beat Lorenzo Musetti — the 13th seed, a two-time Grand Slam semi-finalist, a player whose backhand gets shown in slow motion on television — by three sets to one. The score was 3-6, 6-1, 6-2, 6-2. It was not a fluke, a rain-affected mess or a five-set war of attrition. Sweeny simply got better as the night went on, and one of the most gifted players in the sport could not do anything about it.

If you have never heard of him, that is not a gap in your tennis knowledge. It is the point. Sweeny was ranked No. 123 in the world when the draw was made. He had never won a match in the main draw at Flushing Meadows, because he had never been in the main draw at Flushing Meadows. And he only got a place in it because of a small piece of administrative luck that had nothing to do with him.

The wildcard that was meant for somebody else

Every year the US Open and Tennis Australia swap a wildcard. The Americans hand one to an Australian in New York, the Australians hand one to an American in Melbourne, and everybody shakes hands. It is one of the quiet acts of diplomacy that keeps the tennis calendar civil.

This year the Australian half of that deal was earmarked for Alexei Popyrin — a bigger name, a former Masters champion, exactly the sort of player these gifts usually go to. Then Alejandro Davidovich Fokina withdrew from the tournament. One withdrawal moves the cut-off line by one place, and one place was all Popyrin needed to get into the draw on his own ranking. The wildcard came free. It slid down the list, and at the bottom of that list, in late August, was Dane Sweeny.

So he did not earn his place with a heroic qualifying run or a giant summer. He got it the way you get the last seat on an overbooked flight: by being next in line when somebody else did not need theirs. He has since turned that seat into the fortnight of his life.

There is something wonderful about that if you watch tennis rather than play it. We are trained by the sport to think of the draw as a hierarchy — seeds at the top, ranking numbers next to every name, an order of merit printed on the wall. Then a bureaucratic accident lets a man in through a side door and he knocks over the 13th best player in the world. The hierarchy is real, and it is also thinner than it looks.

A first Grand Slam win that nobody enjoyed

Sweeny's first main-draw win in New York, on the Tuesday, was one of the strangest matches of the week — and he barely got to celebrate it.

He was playing Corentin Moutet, the French left-hander who does not go quietly anywhere. Sweeny won the first set in a tie-break, 7-6 with a 4 in the shoot-out, took the second 6-4, and then broke twice to lead 3-0 in the third. At that point Moutet, struggling with a wrist, told the chair umpire he wanted to retire.

What followed was pure tennis theatre. The umpire queried it. Moutet insisted he did not want a trainer, did not want treatment, just wanted to stop. There was a standoff of the kind that only happens in a sport where the rules were written by committees a long time ago. Eventually the retirement was accepted, the handshake happened, and Dane Sweeny had won his first Grand Slam match at Flushing Meadows in the least satisfying way available.

If you have ever had a win at work land in your lap because somebody else dropped out, you will recognise the feeling exactly: relief, a little embarrassment, and the private worry that people will file it under luck rather than under you. Two days later he removed all doubt.

Ninety minutes when the match turned

Musetti started the way seeds are supposed to start. He took the first set 6-3, doing the things that make him such a lovely player to watch: the one-handed backhand, the changes of pace, the sense that he is playing a slightly different sport to everybody else on the court.

And then it went away, and it went away fast. Sweeny won the second set 6-1. He broke early in the third and went to 3-0, at which point Musetti called for a medical timeout. He came back, retrieved one break, and spent much of the rest of the night talking animatedly in the direction of his coaching box, the way players do when the problem is not the opponent but the whole evening.

The third set went 6-2. The fourth went 6-2. From the middle of the second set onwards Sweeny won 18 of the last 23 games, which is not the arithmetic of a hot streak. It is the arithmetic of a man who worked out what he needed to do and then did it for two hours while a stadium full of New Yorkers slowly adopted him.

Sweeny's own explanation of how he plays is the least glamorous self-assessment you will hear all fortnight. "I think I am kind of mastering the art of diving," he said afterwards. "But I think I have a bit of a point-starter serve and I am not hitting too many winners, so it makes for a few more rallies, and hopefully that is entertaining."

Take that seriously as a strategy rather than as a joke. He is telling you he has no free points, no ace count to hide behind, and no way of ending a rally early. His entire game is built on making the other man play one more ball. Against a top-15 player with a delicate touch and a long history of finding matches emotionally exhausting, that turned out to be the perfect plan.

The Sunshine Coast kid with the point-starter serve

Sweeny was born in Penrith, in the western suburbs of Sydney, in February 2001, but he grew up on the Queensland coast. The origin story is almost too Australian to be true: he learned to hit balls on the beach with his father, Clay, before joining the Mooloolaba Tennis Club as a junior.

There is no academy in that sentence. No relocation to Florida at 13, no famous coach, no equipment deal at 15. Mooloolaba is a beach town with a surf club and a fish market. It is the kind of place that produces good club players and, occasionally, someone who will not stop.

He turned professional and did what almost every player outside the top 100 does: he disappeared into the second division of tennis, the ATP Challenger Tour, and stayed there for years. He also, for a long time, went nowhere. As recently as last season he was outside the world's top 500.

If you only watch the Grand Slams — and most people who love tennis only watch the Grand Slams, which is a perfectly respectable way to be a fan — that gap is invisible. You see 128 names in a draw and assume they all arrived by roughly the same road. They did not. Roughly a hundred of them arrived by Sweeny's road, and it is worth understanding what that road actually costs.

What 63 wins and 73 losses actually looks like

Sweeny's Challenger record going into this summer was 63 wins and 73 losses. Take a second with that. Nine years of professional tennis, and at the level where he has spent most of his career he has lost more matches than he has won.

Challengers are held in sports centres in provincial cities. The crowds are family, local members and a few retirees who have brought their own chairs. Players share hotel rooms to make the week affordable, travel without coaches because a coach costs more than the tournament pays, and lose in the second round on a Wednesday to somebody ranked 240 who is having a good week. The winner of an event at that level collects a cheque that a Grand Slam first-round loser would consider a rounding error.

Sweeny lost two Challenger finals before he ever won one — Burnie in 2024, Playford in 2025 — which is its own particular torture. Then, in February this year, at the Queensland International in Brisbane, he finally got over the line. He beat his compatriot Tristan Schoolkate 3-6, 7-6, 7-6, saving the tournament in two tie-breaks, on home soil, four days before his 25th birthday.

That was his first professional title. He was 24 years old and had been at it for the best part of a decade.

His career prize money, across all of it, is a little under a million US dollars. That sounds like a lot until you remember it is a gross figure covering nine years, out of which come flights, hotels, entry fees, racket stringing, physio, tax in whichever country he happened to be earning in, and any coaching he could afford. We wrote a whole piece on what players actually keep from prize money, and the short version is: far less than the headline.

Which is why the money on offer here matters. The US Open has put up 108 million dollars this year, a 20 per cent rise, and it deliberately loaded the increase into the early rounds — a first-round loser now takes home 140,000 dollars, up more than a quarter on last year, and the tournament has added a two-million-dollar player support fund on top. The champion will get 5.5 million and the photographs. But for the men and women ranked between 100 and 250, the first three rounds of a Grand Slam are not a stepping stone to anything. They are the year.

Dane Sweeny has now won two matches in that draw. Whatever happens next, this fortnight has changed his accounting for the next twelve months.

Suddenly the only Australian left

The other thing that happened this week is that Australia's tournament fell apart around him.

Alex de Minaur went out in the second round, beaten in straight sets by Botic van de Zandschulp, the Dutchman ranked 70th in the world, 6-4, 7-5, 6-2. De Minaur was the sixth seed. He is the player Australia expects to see in the second week, the one whose matches get the good slot on the schedule at home. Thanasi Kokkinakis never made it to New York at all after picking up an ankle and calf problem in Cincinnati. Popyrin — the man whose wildcard this originally was — is gone. Schoolkate is gone, beaten by Flavio Cobolli.

So the last Australian man in the singles draw is the one who got in by accident. On a continent where tennis is followed with genuine national attention for two weeks in January and then observed from a distance for the rest of the year, that is a story with legs. Australian breakfast television has a new name to learn, and by the sound of the crowd in New York on Thursday night, so does everyone else.

Sweeny sounded, afterwards, like a man who has spent long enough at the other end of the sport to know exactly what he has been handed. "I am so grateful to even be able to compete in Grand Slams," he said. "I have put a lot of work in. The tennis journey is such a rollercoaster. I am so incredibly grateful to play in front of such an awesome crowd, and to soak up this moment and get a couple of wins, it is awesome."

You can hear the years in that. Nobody who has spent their career winning talks about being grateful to be allowed in.

Darderi next, and the maths of a good fortnight

The third round brings Luciano Darderi, and the seeding sheet says this is where it should stop. Darderi is Italian, born in Argentina, ranked around the low twenties, and has five tour titles to his name. Every single one of them came on clay.

That last detail is the whole match. Darderi is a serious player who has built his career on high, heavy topspin and long rallies on slow dirt, and he reached the third round here last year, so this is not foreign territory. But New York in September is fast and low, and Sweeny has spent his life on Australian hard courts. The tie is closer than the ranking gap suggests.

There is also the ranking to play for. Sweeny went into the fortnight at 123 and Thursday's win moved him to around 109 in the live rankings — inside touching distance of the top 100, which is the line that separates one professional life from another. Inside it, you get into Grand Slam main draws automatically. Outside it, you play three qualifying matches in the week before the tournament starts and hope. That single number decides whether you spend your year in stadiums or in sports halls.

He has been close before. His career-high, set in late July, was 121. He qualified for the Australian Open in January and beat Gael Monfils in the first round before running into Ben Shelton, and he qualified for Wimbledon in June. This is not a man appearing from nowhere; it is a man who has been knocking on the door for two seasons and finally found it unlocked.

The bit that makes the sport worth watching

Here is what a fan actually gets out of a night like Thursday.

For two weeks a year, tennis puts its whole professional class into one building. The famous ones and the anonymous ones use the same locker room, the same practice courts and the same physio table, and they play under the same lights. Almost every other week of the season, those two groups never meet. The Grand Slams are the only place where the 123rd best player in the world can walk on court against the 13th and find out, in public, exactly how far apart they really are.

Usually the answer is: quite far. That is why seeds exist and why the same faces reach the second week. But every so often the answer is that they are not far apart at all — that the gap between a top-15 seed and a man who lost a Challenger final in Burnie two years ago is a couple of loose service games and one bad evening.

Dane Sweeny may lose in the third round. He may lose badly. It will not undo anything. He has already produced the version of this sport that no draw sheet can predict and no amount of money can manufacture: a player nobody was watching, in a match nobody circled, doing something that will follow him for the rest of his life.

If you want to know when tennis is at its best, it is not the final. It is a Thursday night in the first week, when the man who got in on somebody else's wildcard refuses to go home.

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Related reading on super.tennis: the complete US Open guide.